Re: The impact of a module's license on the requiring Lua program

[Romulo <romuloab@...>]

Am 11. April 2012 13:34 schrieb David Favro <lua@meta-dynamic.com>:
> On 04/11/2012 11:11 AM, Matthew Wild wrote:
>> The simple fact is that many
>> (most) people around here have MIT-licensed projects already, and
>> releasing a GPL library will prevent many potential users from using
>> the library.
>
> Actually, it doesn't prevent them from using it, their existing MIT codebase
> is compatible with GPL.

I'm no legal expert, but MIT may be compatible with GPL in the sense
the code is available somehow to the public. The difference is that
GPL forces you to publish ALL of your source code if your compiled
program leaves your computer [1]. So, if you have a commercial product
and perhaps have licensed other software to use strictly with your,
you can't use a GPL'd code because you'd have to publish them as well.

Thus, people get "upset" about GPL'ers because we would like to use
your software but are unable to due legal reasons. On the other hand,
if the license was MIT or similar, then we could use it on our
software and then we could contribute to your code by fixing bugs,
adding features or simply giving some ideas where to improve, AND then
also use it ourselves in our closed-source softwares without the need
to GPL them all.


As others have mentioned, you can put whatever license you like in
your code, but GPL simply isn't useful for the most of us. Not for a
library at least (gcc is GPL but I won't embed it in my software and
it doesn't require all compiled programs to be GPL'd, thus it is not
the same thing).

--rb

[1] Once again, I'm not a legal expert. It is just an aproximation of
what I understand it to be ;)